According to U.S. Pat. No. 5,942,867, issued Aug. 24, 1999 to Richmond, barrier or gate operators have become quite popular and are receiving widespread use, both for residential environments and business environments. Frequently, it is desirable to use a gate system for controlling access to a business office, an apartment building, or home. In order to provide either vehicle or pedestrian access, or both, gate operators are frequently employed and control the opening and closing movement of the gate.
Most gate operators usually employ a motor mechanism, such as an electrically or hydraulically powered motor along with one or more connecting arms which connect the motor to the gate in order to provide for an opening and closing driving movement.
As indicated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,869,940, issued Feb. 9, 1999 to Parsadayan, the gate may swing about a vertical hinge axis to open and close, or may move horizontally along a guide way. The Parsadayan patent describes a control system with a learning mode allowing a human to move the gate either manually or under powered operation with manual control, and during which the control system learns desired accelerations, decelerations, pauses, etc., along with start and finish positions for the gate movement in each direction of movement for the gate between opened and closed positions. Thereafter, during powered operation of the gate by the operator, the desired movement profile taught by a human to the operator during a learning mode experience is replicated. In the event that no preferred gate movement profile is available to the gate operator from a learning mode experience, it uses a default gate movement profile. Various default profiles of gate movement may be stored in memory and may be selected by an owner of the gate.
Other known control or barrier operators provide for (1) opening and closing movement of the gate in response to a signal and further provide a force in opposition to those movements to cushion the impact of the gate against any abutment at the fixed end positions (see the Richmond 867' patent); (2) starting and stopping the barrier at different speeds during travel along different parts of the path of travel such as when the gate encounters an obstruction in the path of the barrier (see U.S. Pat. No. 7,042,183, issued May 9, 2006 to Fitzgibbon et al.), and (3) a device for overcoming opening and closing speed variations in a gate due to mechanical design-related characteristics to achieve a defined and unchanging gate section speed, except during opening and closing (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,859,004, issued Feb. 22, 2005 to Hormann).
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a barrier operator that preferably includes variable rate movement control modes and a panic control override mode to open or close the barrier at a relatively greater rate than typically used to open or close the gate during normal operation for use in, among other things, gates, doors, and windows.